


Cultivation, An Art

by tigers_bedtime



Category: The Secret Garden - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-19
Updated: 2014-04-19
Packaged: 2018-01-20 01:51:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1492315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigers_bedtime/pseuds/tigers_bedtime
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>“That great Cathedral space which was childhood.”  - Virginia Woolf </i> </p><p>[Collection of unrelated shortfic]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Persuasion

**Author's Note:**

> Backdated work [2007]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Child's play.

The morning was warm and she was not. Oh, what a glorious reason to hate the world! She tragically plopped with a heavy exhalation into a team of dark purple-green; sat cross-legged, cross-armed. Her white dress brushed about her, and there was a dark blue ribbon in her hair.

Red mouth twisting his ruddy face, he peered into the damp shadows of her cave. He argued the sunrays promised so many things, and she believed him because his eyes told her to.

So she pulled him down to her, him and his Magic, and the world was good again.


	2. Go, Traveler

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Growing apart.

When you are young and open and still learning, you clutch his dirty hands and kiss his cheeks and nose, and you are sustained by running through the wind (letting the wind run through you).

_“Dickon! Dickon, look! It’s a little bird, fell out of its nest!”_

_“We must hurry, Dickon. She’ll catch us for sure!”_

_“Oh, they’ve survived the frost!”_

But the hour you grew content with a few more comfortable formalities, his unchanged nomadic eyes cried that he is the wind, and cannot be contented with you.

_“We must hurry, Dickon.”_


	3. Persuasion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Seasonal glimpses into a growing relationship.

The garden is glossed with life today. As if its soul were pulsating, it radiates and hums, cloaking the morning with its heady fragrance. It is both dark and light at the same time, cool and hot, sunshine and shadows surrounded by walls of grey. His body is bent beside hers in concentrated warmth. Spade over spade, the damp, rich earth crumbles nostalgically beneath her eager fingers.

**

_Push._

His hands are firm and his voice soft, low and flowing like the wind.

_Push._

She cuts the sky, slides through the green and golden haze of dusk.

_Push_

Feet graze the ground and a push turns to a touch. His speech is audible only because of the proximity of mouth to ear.

She prefers land over air.

**

It rains a bitter, heavy rain. They tumble over each other, much like the children they used to be. They stand under a shelter, boughs of wisteria hanging above them, dripping. There is laughter, twin clouds of breath emanating from their grinning mouths. His face is sweet and wet, she notices, and she feels a fever coming on.

**

She can surely make it back before the snow falls, and the others will worry, but the heat of his room bewitches her.

In an elongated instant, their gazes meet over a wooden table and the mist of steaming myrtle tea.

It begins in a moment which she does not remember starting. She does recall standing, and looking at his hand as it touches her arm. Even sharper than that is the feeling of time pausing, holding its breath along with her.

She is set free in a slow succession of movements. Trembling hands undo lacings and buttons. Hot, moist lips travel along curves and planes. Long fingers chase the shadows on her flesh in the firelight. As a white fury sweeps around the cottage, their bodies slide together slowly and sensuously, slick with sweat and the steam of heavy breathing.

**

Today the greatest evidence of life’s cyclic pulse reveals itself in a red-cheeked bundle with large blue eyes. A baby girl who looks nothing like her mother; a trait that could change with the next season.


	4. Cathedral Space

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A baby for Mary and Dickon, and Colin still stands.

At 6 o’clock, they arrived.

“How are you since the day before yesterday?” He shook firm hands with Dickon, who carried the older girl, Susie, whose intolerably wide, quite blue eyes never closed. She sucked on her miniature thumb and watched him.

“Oh! The place is lovely! Everything sparkling and grand, you’d think royalty was coming! All this for your old cousin, who you practically see every day. Oh, Colin.”

She kissed Colin on the cheek, her fresh smell choking him, then nuzzled her new child.

“Well, shall I see my newest blood-relation?”

Over dinner, Mary’s eyes were wondrous. He regarded her healthy plumpness, and he really thought she blazed in the candlelight, although he reminded himself she’d always done that. Since the garden, anyhow.

Dickon bent to whisper in her ear, making fine wisps of hair dance away from her skin. Colin turned to his wine but could hear the lilt of Yorkshire talk. A secret smile lighted Mary’s lips, and then she remembered she was company and drew a hearty conversation out of the air for them all to share.

Hours after they had left, as he sat alone in his study with only the echoes of the occasion, all Colin could recall was an impertinent little girl who had once held his hand and opened a door.


End file.
